• Regions: Europe; Germany; Italy; North America
• Times: 14th to 16th centuries; 20th century
• Themes: Exile Studies; History of Historiography; Intellectual History; Philosophy; Political History; Renaissance

Iryna Mykhailova is a historian of Renaissance philosophy with focus on Florentine Neoplatonism. She is currently the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Department of History at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in History of Philosophy from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine (2012). From 2012 to 2017, she was an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Kyiv National Linguistic University in Ukraine. She has been a recipient of the Fulbright Award (2014-2015, State University of New York at Albany, USA) and Moritz Stern Fellowship in Modern Jewish Studies (2017-2019, Lichtenberg-Kolleg of Göttingen University, Germany). In recent years, her research mainly focused on the intellectual legacy of German exile historians of Renaissance, who escaped Europe in the 1930-40s due to the Nazi persecution, settled in the United States, and essentially contributed to the development of Renaissance studies in this country. Her current research project, “Humanism behind the Iron Curtain: Italian Renaissance Studies in the Soviet Union,” aims to comprehensively examine scholarship on the Italian Renaissance in the Soviet Union and place it within the broader context of Western historiography of Renaissance in the twentieth century. She is particularly interested in the intellectual networks and knowledge exchange between the European, American, and Soviet scholars of Renaissance. The project is sponsored by the European Commission and is hosted by the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy) with a two-year research phase at Harvard University. The results of this project will be presented, among others, in a monograph, which Iryna Mykhailova is currently working on.
Her recent publications include book chapters “D’Holbach’s Legacy in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union,” in The Great Protector of Wits. D’Holbach and His Time. Laura Nicolì, Ed. (Brill, forthcoming in 2021), “Defending Objectivity: Paul Oskar Kristeller and the Controversy on the Historical Knowledge in the United States,” in Dynamics of Emigration, Epistemic Repercussions. Émigré Scholars and the Production of Historical Knowledge in the Age of Extremes. Stephan Berger and Philipp Müller, Eds. (Berghahn Books, 2022), “Italian Renaissance in Postwar America: Paul Oskar Kristeller and Felix Gilbert,” in The Dissident Renaissance: Rewriting the History of Early Modern Philosophy as Political Practice (forthcoming 2023, Brill Series in Philosophical Historiographies), and “Paul Oskar Kristeller: A Critic of Étienne Gilson?”, in  L’institution philosophique française et la Renaissance : l’époque d’Étienne Gilson  (under review, Brill Series in Philosophical Historiographies).